A female nude emerges from a sea of blue in this experimental photogram. Rauschenberg’s then-wife, Susan Weil, introduced him to this inexpensive photographic technique, which requires little more than a lamp and light-sensitive paper to capture the outline of shapes placed directly onto photo paper. The two artists created numerous lifesized prints such as this together in their small Upper West Side apartment. Graphic and large, these compositions matched the scale and energy of the abstract expressionist paintings in favor at that time.
